FIAC

Magician Space is pleased to present works by Li Jinghu, Tang Yongxiang and Wu Hao at FIAC.

Li Jinghu (b. 1972) lives and works in Dongguan, Guangdong. As a "World Factory" and "prototype of Opening and Reform", the southern industrial city located at Pearl River Delta has witnessed rapid changes in modernization and traditional life. Li Jinghu's work, often in the form of sculpture and installation, is rooted in this local quotidian experience. Through the transformation of shape and attributes of everyday objects, he initiated profound poetic meanings that lie in the mediocrity of life, embedded with direct references to reality. "Constellation" finds its inspiration and compartments in Chang’an Town of Dongguan, where metal accessories manufacturing is the leading business. The keen demand for rhinestone-inlaying work has catalysed family workshops and generated important secondary income for impoverished households. Families gather outside of their rented places every day producing accessory items around crude tables, each is lit on a table lamp to evoke a cluster of stars in the night sky. Such an image of pureness is unsettled in relationship to the hardship of these families who labour with these materials from generation to generation. Being simultaneously nostalgic and self-mockery, Li Jinghu's work seeks to dissolve boundaries between art and life, and by rejecting experiences filtered through ideologies, the artist provokes aesthetic redemptions in respond to collective realities.

Li Jinghu, the Constellation，2015，metal，wood，rhinestone，200x200x87cm

Tang Yongxiang (b. 1977, Hubei Province) currently lives and works in Beijing. He employs a methodology that deliberately thwarts experiences acquired through the academy or the art-history canon, applying layers with a repetitive and mechanical technique of cross-hatching. He intentionally searches for the unnoticed areas of quotidian existence such as the back of a figure, a hand gesture, or an arrangement of still lifes. Material is culled from photographs and repeatedly function to extract and reshape information through engaging with the memory of the artist. Tang wishes to rely more upon intuition, and through the repetition of layers, he in many ways also empties the background of the first layer. He resorts to making cuts, movement, addition, and duplication on existing images, redistributes parts in relation to a whole, and by doing so, frees negative form as well as the ambivalence between positive and negative forms, ultimately initiates a complex discourse on the irresolvable and ambivalent relationship between narrative and space. Tang intentionally leaves behind obstacles and creates ruptures within his compositions, which become the entry point into the imagining forms, leading towards an entanglement and struggle between subjective appearance and an illusory appearance.

The work of Wu Hao (b. 1985 in Wuhan, currently lives and works in Beijing) encompasses his explorations on a motif throughout years, at the same time poring through its essence and opening up possibilities. Through his skilful control of paintings, Wu Hao foresees the material dispositions of which temporality or ephemerality could act upon his works, and from here, embarks a journey on the exploration of time. In the ongoing series “Watermarks” (2012 - ), The artist creates temporal paintings through the evaporation of various mixtures of acrylic paint on vessels of varying shapes and sizes, leaving archives of the time compressed. As the liquid evaporates in the span of months, it creates layers of gradations on glasses that delineate chromatic and textural variations, endowing objects with a sense of spirituality while also creating a space for the artist to reflect on himself. “Watermark Project”, as a variation of the series, invites public participation in the form of artist workshops, and in the end, presents vessels that bear individual living traces collectively. “Watermarks” temps on the edge of the painting while presenting a seemingly self-generated image with little interference of the artist. Meanwhile, its interactivity, performativity and sociality esteemed from urban environment, climate, and politicalcontributes have opened up interpretations of this series of works. Containing important channels for Wu Hao to simultaneously look inwards and explore social attributes in his creation, “Watermarks” series has become a metaphorical clue for his aesthetic perceptions and pursuits.